People Are Siding With Former Michigan Inmate-Turned-Mother Being Hounded by the State

Yesterday's report of a 53-year-old mother named Susan LeFevre (who assumed an identity as Marie Walsh) living in Santee, California who was arrested for fleeing the State of Michigan 32 years ago after having served time in the state for a year on a 20-year sentence for allegedly dealing heroin has been an outrage. It is an outrage because this woman has never aggressed against any individual, never committed theft, and never committed destruction of another individual's property.

The Saginaw-Area News noted the following:

LeFevre said she agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and violation of drug laws in hopes of winning leniency, but received the maximum sentence of 10 to 20years.

Of course, since the reporting of this story, the public has increasingly swarmed to LeFevre's side, except that not everyone is sympathetic to her.

According to a piece in the Detroit Free Press:

If Susan Lefevre has managed to stay out of trouble in the 32 years since her escape from a women's prison in Northville Township, that's proof she is rehabilitated and she should be freed, according to many Free Press readers who contacted the paper via e-mail, telephone or posted their views on freep.com.

'I just can't believe Michigan's going after her,' said John Paul, 58, of Plymouth. 'This woman has rehabilitated herself and saved the taxpayers money.'

Lefevre, 53, was sentenced to serve 10 to 20 years in prison in February 1975 after being convicted of conspiracy to violate drug laws and violation of drug laws. She escaped a year later.

According to the U.S. Marshals Service, Lefevre had been living what appeared to be a law-abiding life under the name Marie Walsh as a married mother of three in California.

Subhash Kapur, 60, of Bloomfield Hills said he was so upset by the Lefevre story that he wrote a letter to Gov. Jennifer Granholm asking that Lefevre be pardoned.

'I was just very, very disturbed about it,' he said. 'I never wrote a letter to anybody, but this really bothered me.'

While I am pleased that many of the people who followed up on the story urged Governor Granholm to pardon Susan LeFevre, it is still distressing that the collectivistic, vile, and heartless scumbags who happen to be the state law enforcement officials and bureaucrats want to lock this woman away for 20 years of her life, taking away the life that she has made for herself and her family. If she had remained in that hellhole they call the Detroit House of Corrections, she would have not lived through it because of its well-known violent, gang-populated prison environment.

This isn't done to show that she "made a horrible mistake" or show that she "committed a horrible, evil crime." This is all done to make an example of a woman, just to send a message to all of us that we all must be herded like cattle so that the state can rule over us anytime, any day of the week.

That's what this evil is all about.

Ron Paul: 'Still Running'

By the way, CNN's Wolf Blitzer points out that Ron's new book A Revolution: A Manifesto is "already a major bestseller."

Border Patrol Agents Allow Some "Illegal Immigrants" Go....Again

The Border Patrol goons are allowing some "illegal immigrants" a.k.a. independent migrants go...again, thanks to a loophole in the federal government's War on Immigration.

Here's an excerpt of the USA Today piece on this story:

EL PASO — Josefa Gonzalez Loya has sneaked across the Mexican border at least 128 times in the past eight years. And each time, the Border Patrol has been nice enough to give her a lift home.

Gonzalez and a group of other women and children — all Indians from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca — have no interest in staying in the United States. All they want to do is panhandle outside El Paso businesses, using the children as lures.

At the end of a productive day, they wait for the Border Patrol to come pick them up and drive them back to the border.

Little dramas like this play out day after day, accounting for thousands of arrests but hardly any prosecutions in the past several years.

The Oaxacan immigrants fall under a loophole that gives border agents discretion to keep some adults and children together and out of jail.

'They do qualify for jail and prosecution,' Border Patrol spokesman Ramiro Cordero said. 'However, we've got to look at the humanitarian factor first if we are going to have to separate the family.'

Fed to Ban Certain Credit Card Practices

The Fed is pushing for new government regulations on the credit card industry, regulations that would ban specific practices of the companies.

Here's a snippet of what the Washington Post piece on the ban:

If they are instituted, they would constitute the most significant crackdown on the credit card industry in decades. The rules would, among other things, specify when card issuers can increase interest rates on existing balances, ban finance charges on balances that have been repaid, and prohibit late fees on customers who were not given a reasonable amount of time to pay.

Consumers have long complained about such practices. The Fed responded last year with a proposal, still under consideration, to require card companies to improve disclosure forms.

Wait a second here! Didn't the Federal Reserve, with the passage of laws such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Truth in Lending Act, and the Fair Credit Billing Act, help usher in the credit card industry with its expansionist pool of credit in the economy? Weren't these regulations supposed to control what credit card companies can charge via interest rates, the waiting period of consumers submitting in their credit card payments, etc.? Didn't the credit card consumers read the fine print before they signed up with the firms?

These companies are a creation of the Fed and have nothing to do with the free market. The Fed and the card companies have been in collusion for years as far as what the card companies can do with regards to charging their customers, boosting the interest rates (which are tacked onto the Fed's subprime rate) to high levels (partly because of federal intervention in the credit and housing markets and partly because of credit risks, not to mention bad decision making between the credit card companies and the credit cardholders).

These new regulations will do more harm than good, simply because they will encourage more credit risks consumers who lag behind on their payments to become more irresponsible with their spending and payment habits and unfairly penalize consumers with excellent credit.

As one paragraph in the Washington Post piece correctly noted:

Edward L. Yingling, president and chief executive of the American Bankers Association, said the rules would restrict the ability of card companies to charge interest rates that reflect the risks of different customers, thus forcing them to raise rates on everyone, even those with good credit.

If anything, why doesn't the government get out of the money-printing and credit card business and allow private decisions be handled more effectively between the customers and the card companies? Wouldn't that be far more worth it than a bunch of never-ending regulations that are designed to fix the old regulations that failed? After all, won't the new regulations end up failing too in the long term as well?

My Endorsement of Mary Ruwart Posted on Her Campaign Website

My official endorsement of LP presidential candidate Mary Ruwart is now posted on her campaign site. I sent it in to the campaign late last night, and lo and behold -- it was featured on the site here and here.

Here's what the endorsement says on the site:

Mary Ruwart's the best choice for the LP presidential nomination. She's very honest, extremely consistent, and immensely principled. She's the libertarian Hillary Clinton, except she supports freedom completely, whereas Hillary doesn't. Equally important, her book Healing Our World In An Age of Aggression has inspired my ideas and views on human liberty. I wish there were more people like her. Honestly.

Todd Andrew Barnett, Talk Show Host of Liberty Cap Talk Live on NowLive.com, Online Columnist, and Creator of the Let Liberty Ring Blog